The consumption of power and the dissipation of heat in data centers is expanding everyday. With mega-datacenters opening around the world, efficiencies in cooling, monitoring, and managing these data centers can significantly reduce cost, power consumption, and improve system up-time and reliability. Tracking of systems, automating cooling, and overall data center management is still mostly a manual process in the data center. For example, monitoring temperatures inside of Data Centers has been a manual process where employees walk around the data center and gather temperature information. Assignee IBM (International Business Machines, Inc.) is a leader in developing new technology such as robotic temperature sensing systems that automatically traverse a data center gathering temperature information.
Take for example the sensing of temperature at various points inside of a raised floor. If the human or robot takes a set of temperature readings across the data center, the data is analyzed for temperature hot spots or cold spots. Thermal adjustments are made by altering the duct work or baffling to better distribute cooling; normally done underneath the raised floor. Although there are some electronic valves that are marketed, the entire data center temperature equilibrium process is a manual event.
Regarding tracking systems, only recently are RFID's being considered as additions to data center devices and racks. This process again is a manual process implemented by data center and raised floor employees. However, RFID's by themselves are not a solution. These RFID's need to be read by a human carrying a reader or by a robot that periodically scans the data center.
Although data centers are getting smarter to some degree, the speed of evolution is not matching the speed at which data centers are being created, consuming power, and being distributed worldwide. A better solution for automating data centers via core construction is needed.